# Boris Johnson British politician; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (2019–2022), Foreign Secretary (2016–2018), Mayor of London (2008–2016), and the public frontman of the official [[Vote Leave]] campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Johnson is the central British figure in the Brexit story and a key node connecting the UK's departure from the EU and broader [[Euroscepticism]] to the transatlantic populist network that included [[Donald Trump]] and [[Steve Bannon]]. ## Vote Leave and Brexit Johnson was the most prominent campaigner for [[Vote Leave]], the official Leave campaign in the June 2016 referendum, directed by [[Dominic Cummings]]. The campaign relied heavily on data-driven Facebook advertising and was later found to have committed the [[Vote Leave Overspend]] — channeling more than £600,000 through the nominally separate [[BeLeave]] youth campaign to evade legal spending limits. Cummings publicly boasted that the campaign's "billions of impressions" of targeted advertising in the final days swung the result. Johnson's "£350 million a week for the NHS" bus slogan became the emblem of the campaign's relationship to factual accuracy, and a recurring example in discussions of political [[Disinformation]]. ## The Mifsud Connection Just before [[Robert Mueller]]'s first indictment in October 2017, [[Joseph Mifsud]] — the Maltese academic described in the [[Mueller Investigation]] as having "substantial connections to Russian government officials," and the proximate trigger of [[Crossfire Hurricane]] — was reportedly boasting about meeting Johnson to discuss Brexit. A photograph later surfaced of Mifsud with Johnson at a Conservative fundraising dinner (also present was Prasenjit Kumar Singh), placing the figure at the origin of the Russia investigation in the same room as Britain's Foreign Secretary. The episode, surfaced in [[Peter Jukes]]'s reporting and his Mueller essay, illustrates how the threads of the American Russia investigation ran through London. ## The Bannon Relationship During and after the Brexit campaign, Johnson cultivated a relationship with [[Steve Bannon]], then in and around the Trump White House. The connection tied the Brexit project to the broader [[Global New Right Network]] and to the Trump-Bannon information-operations apparatus, with the same advisers, donors, and data operations recurring on both sides of the Atlantic. ## RWKB Significance Johnson is the British counterpart to [[Donald Trump]] in the 2016 populist wave: the charismatic frontman of a data-driven, rule-breaking campaign that exploited the surveillance-advertising infrastructure exposed by the [[Cambridge Analytica]] scandal. His proximity to [[Joseph Mifsud]] and [[Steve Bannon]] places him directly within the transatlantic web that the [[Robert Mueller]] investigation and [[Carole Cadwalladr]]'s reporting independently mapped. ## See Also - [[Vote Leave]] — The campaign he fronted - [[Vote Leave Overspend]] — Its unlawful spending - [[Dominic Cummings]] — Campaign director and later his chief adviser - [[Joseph Mifsud]] — The Russia-investigation figure photographed with him - [[Steve Bannon]] — Transatlantic ally - [[Nigel Farage]] — The other face of Brexit